Creating large field sets in a text editor?

[GWSwicord]

Greetings, good people,

By any chance, are the field sets stored as plain text somewhere? I need to build and experiment with sets that list 50-90 fields.

Regards,
G.W.

[tventimi]

Hi G.W.,

That's a really interesting question. Below I'll explain a little bit about how the field sets are stored. There is a way to accomplish what you want to do, though it is a somewhat technical.

All the info for the field sets is stored in the Windows registry under the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VB and VBA Program Settings\Excel Catalog Lookup\FieldSets

If you go to this key, you will get an idea about how the data is structured. Each field set is assigned a 3-digit zero-padded (and zero-based) sequence number. So, for example for set 001, there is a value NAME001 with the set name, and one or more values FIELD001-XXX that list the individual fields within the set. MAX001 gives the maximum sequence number within the set (i.e. the total fields in the set minus 1), and then there is also a MAXALL value that gives the maximum sequence number assigned to a set (i.e. the total number of field sets minus 1).

What this means in a practical sense is that you could create a text file with a list of fields in a format that could be imported to the registry. If you give the file the ".reg" suffix and then double-click it, it should update your registry with the list of fields, which would be visible the next time you run the plugin. Here is an example. Let's say I look in the registry and see I already have 3 field sets with the sequence numbers 000, 001, 002 (and where the "MAXALL" value is "2"). I can generate another field set by creating text file with the following content.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VB and VBA Program Settings\Excel Catalog Lookup\FieldSets]
"MAXALL"="3"
"NAME003"="test set"
"MAX003"="3"
"FIELD003-000"="Title"
"FIELD003-001"="*Call No."
"FIELD003-002"="505"
"FIELD003-003"="**Barcode"

So, this updates "MAXALL" to "3", and creates a new field set with the set with the sequence number "003". Within that field set, there are 4 fields with the sequence numbers 000 through 003.

Please let me know if that makes sense. Also if you send me an specific example of what you are trying to do, I can try to generate a registry file in the format described above.

Tom Ventimiglia
Princeton University Library